This weird, wonderful film is the first feature from French director Leos Carax in more than a decade: it is partly surreal and entirely bonkers, a brilliantly inventive film that could mean almost anything. Devis Levant plays Monsieur Oscar, a mysterious figure who travels around Paris in a limousine, emerging for a string of dreamlike adventures in a series of elaborate disguises. Cameos from Eva Mendes and Kylie Minogue. 28 September

Since its arrival at Sundance earlier this year, this has gained a hugely enthusiastic fanbase, who rave about its Terrence Malick-esque beauty and a performance from nine-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis. A girl called Hushpuppy lives in the remote Louisiana Bayou and must fend for herself when her father gets ill, and the waters begin to rise. 19 October

Marion Cotillard stars with newcomer Matthias Schoenaerts in Jacques Audiard's film. Cotillard plays a young woman who works in an amusement-park, training whales to do tricks for the crowd. After suffering a horrible accident, she strikes up a friendship and then a romance with a moody kickboxer called Ali. Despite its bizarre premise this is a surgingly old-fashioned love story made with passion and elan. 2 November

Much has happened since the appearance of the last Twilight movie. A hunk of online fan fiction has been reworked as the soft-porn megaseller Fifty Shades of Grey, and Kristen Stewart has been caught "making out" with someone who was not Robert Pattinson. It is difficult to tell how the volatile fanbase will take to this final film, but it is bound to dominate the airwaves. 16 November

Austrian director Michael Haneke won his second Palme d'Or at Cannes with this remarkable film, an intimate chamber-piece with something of Bergman's Scenes From A Marriage about it. Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva are Georges and Anne, an elderly, happily married couple in Paris; when Anne suffers a stroke and begins to decline, their love faces the greatest test of all. 16 November

Ben Wheatley brings his distinctive black-comic touch to this film written and performed by Steve Oram and Alice Lowe. They play Chris and Tina, who take a longed-for caravanning holiday together in Yorkshire, but find that their romantic freedom morphs into something else: a strange and sociopathic taste for violence. This could be British cinema's must-see of 2012. 30 November